Rodrigo Pizarro, the current chief executive of L’Oréal Groupe’s Australian and New Zealand arm will move to a new role within the company, and the company’s Greece CEO, Alex Davison, will assume his role.
Davison has been the chief executive officer of L’Oréal Groupe in Greece for the past three years, where the company has achieved double-digit growth and been named a top employer in the country during his tenure.
Pizarro, who has led the French beauty giant’s Australian operations for the last nine years, has helped L’Oréal transform into a leading digital business, with a strong focus on data analytics and AI. In an interview with Forbes Australia, Pizarro said each employee at the company in Australia and New Zealand had undergone a data literacy program to enable them to make data-centric decisions.
“Over the past nine years, Rodrigo has built a strong business that has people at the centre of its success,” Davison says. “This aligns with my personal leadership values and I’m looking forward to working with the team as we build brands tailored for Australian and New Zealand consumers, and a business focused on sustainability and diversity.”
Sales at L’Oréal Groupe amounted to 38.26 billion euros for the 2022 calendar year, representing a 23.4% increase on 2019. The company also experienced a strong improvement in its operating margin, with operating profits of more than 7.4 billion euros.
The first quarter of 2023 saw the global beauty giant achieve sales of 10.38 billion euro, with the company citing Australia as a major sales driver. In April this year, the Groupe also acquired Australian luxury skincare brand, Aēsop, which reported sales of $US537 million in 2022.
Davison joins the Australian business as L’Oréal Groupe reaffirms its “beauty for all, beauty for each” strategy, which has seen the company invest heavily in artificial intelligence to achieve hyper-personalisation.
“It’s about the gold mine of our unequalled beauty database – the highest and the richest, when it comes to beauty, in the world,” deputy CEO, Barbara Lavernos says.
“This treasure encompasses everything from ingredients to the science of hair and skin, beauty routines and consumer insights since the creation of our company more than a century ago. We have over 5,000 terabytes in our L’Oréal beauty-tech platform.”
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